When bullied, NJEA battles back

Jerry McCrea/The Star-LedgerBarbara Keshishian, president of the New Jersey Education Association, says she believes the NJEA
has an obligation to speak out when students and their families suffer.

By Barbara Keshishian

In the past year, the New Jersey Education Association has taken more than its share of criticism while fending off Gov. Chris Christie’s attacks on school funding and public education.
Yet on March 13, The Star-Ledger went too far. In an editorial, the paper ridiculed NJEA’s spending $6.6 million on advertising that challenged Christie’s priorities and misinformation.
It depicted NJEA’s relationship with Christie as a prizefight, calling our ads “ineffective counterpunches,” saying I am “no match for Christie” and that “if this were a heavyweight fight, it would have been stopped on cuts long ago.” Chris Christie is a pugnacious character, but suggesting that the organization representing teachers and school employees should, as a matter of course, be engaged in figurative fisticuffs with him is troubling — even if no governor has ever treated the state’s teachers with such disdain and disrespect.

I believe NJEA has an obligation to speak out when our students and their families suffer budget cuts, larger classes, fewer programs and ever-expanding user fees.
Still, I was taken aback by another article appearing in the same edition, by Kevin Manahan (who serves on The Star-Ledger’s editorial board) criticizing the media for failing to “do their homework” about Christie and asserting that “their shallow questions” allow Christie to inflate his achievements.

How can The Star-Ledger criticize the media’s failure to hold Christie accountable for his misinformation, and then criticize NJEA for doing that in our advertising? Isn’t that just a bit hypocritical?

This past year has been one continuous assault on the NJEA, public education and our members by this bully of a governor. As the recent story in Wisconsin proved, Christie’s attack is part of an overall rightwing extremist strategy to demonize public employee unions — and teacher unions in particular.

Does The Star-Ledger think NJEA should cower in the face of this attack? Should we allow Christie to spread misinformation about teachers, school employees and public education without responding? If so, why take the media to task for failing to expose the governor’s casual relationship with the truth?
Even more disconcerting is The Star-Ledger’s saying that our advertising fell on deaf ears because most teachers chose not to accept a salary freeze last year. Here’s a fact: NJEA does not have the authority to force our members to reopen the approximately 1,000 contracts under which they work.

We did, however, provide them with information outlining the pros and cons of taking a freeze, to help them decide what to do in their districts. One of the cons was that taking a freeze could not guarantee there would be no layoffs, because the law at that time prohibited any such linkage — which is why many local unions that did negotiate freezes were understandably upset when the savings went to priorities other than the rehiring of laid-off colleagues.

That is why NJEA filed legislation requiring any savings from salary concessions be used to restore laid-off staff. The bills, S1940/A2773, passed both the state Assembly and Senate by overwhelming bipartisan margins and await Christie’s signature.

He should sign it because, last year, he ran a dishonest campaign against school budgets. Spreading the false claim that if all teachers had taken a pay freeze, there would have been no layoffs, Christie urged voters to reject their budgets if their teachers had not agreed to a freeze.
Only one problem: Last April, the state’s Office of Legislative Services reported that if every teacher in New Jersey took a pay freeze, districts would still be $849 million in the hole, thanks to the governor’s cuts in state aid. Christie, to put it bluntly, was misleading voters. His response? He simply rejected the OLS report — his typical reaction to data with which he disagrees. It’s a tendency that The Star-Ledger has criticized on more than one occasion.

NJEA and its members are not going to be demonized, demoralized or unfairly criticized by a governor who is carrying out a national attack strategy on public sector unions, and whose stated goal is the privatization of public education.

We teach our students to stand up to bullies. So, when Christie attacks the NJEA and public education, we will swing back hard because, in the end, that’s the only language bullies understand.

Barbara Keshishian is president of the New Jersey Education Association.